The present invention relates to a process for the production of encapsulable globules, applicable particularly to the production of breeding substrates for various types of entomophagous insects, in particular artificial lepidoptera eggs useful for the mass breeding of trichogramma. The process is in addition applicable to any fractionation of an artificial medium into small sized units easy to preserve and manipulate without deterioration.
In the case of artificial eggs of lepidoptera, each unit of encapsulated nutrient medium is intended to permit, within the capsule, the development of one or of several organisms which will have been introduced therein, or to serve as a nutritional unit or prey for organisms capable of exploiting them.
For such use, the production of encapsulation is very complex: on the one hand, the medium must satisfy all of the vital processes of the parasite and ensure its survival, its nutrition, its growth, its organogenesis by providing, in a limited space, all the constituents of a viable and fertile adult. On the other hand, the envelope of the capsule must satisfy numerous simultaneous requirements such as size of eggs, thickness and consistency of the shell, permeability to gases, impermeability to water, inertia with respect to the constituents of the medium; it must in addition permit a normal oviposition.
Taking into account however, the composition of the media to be coated, which are constituted by several tens of suitable compounds of which a part is in the form of a particularly fragile lipid emulsion, the encapsulation cannot be effected by means of the coacervation known in other fields, but by the deposition in vapor phase of a substance polymerizable into a thin film on frozen globules. Due to the fact however of the composition recalled above of the medium to be frozen, it was necessary to develop a production process for such globules.